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Hamlet Globe to Globe: Two Years, 193,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play
Two years, 190,000 miles, 197 countries, one play. For the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth the Globe Theatre in London undertook an unparalleled journey to share Hamlet with the entire world. The tour was the brainchild of Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe, and in Hamlet Globe to Globe, Dromgoole takes readers along with him on this wildly ambitious expedition.
From performing in sweltering deserts, capital and remote cities, heaving marketplaces and on Pacific islands, and despite food poisoning in Mexico, the threat of ambush in Somaliland, an Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and political upheaval in Ukraine, the Globe's players tirelessly pushed on. They carried their own props, instruments, and costumes throughout the journey, and could construct an entire set in less than two hours. Dromgoole introduces this impressive cast of sturdy souls, recounting the highs and lows of their tour, paying witness to Shakespeare's power to transcend borders and bring people closer together.
Dromgoole also shows us the world through the prism of Shakespeare and why, in its mystery, it resonates so widely―how a sixteenth-century play can touch the lives of men and women in Sudan, citizens of Beijing, and Syrian refugees alike. Through the lens of this epic theatrical journey, Dromgoole gleans new insight into Shakespeare's masterpiece, exploring the play's history, its meaning, and its pleasures, and offering a dramatic and heartfelt testament to Shakespeare's enduring presence on the modern stage.
From performing in sweltering deserts, capital and remote cities, heaving marketplaces and on Pacific islands, and despite food poisoning in Mexico, the threat of ambush in Somaliland, an Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and political upheaval in Ukraine, the Globe's players tirelessly pushed on. They carried their own props, instruments, and costumes throughout the journey, and could construct an entire set in less than two hours. Dromgoole introduces this impressive cast of sturdy souls, recounting the highs and lows of their tour, paying witness to Shakespeare's power to transcend borders and bring people closer together.
Dromgoole also shows us the world through the prism of Shakespeare and why, in its mystery, it resonates so widely―how a sixteenth-century play can touch the lives of men and women in Sudan, citizens of Beijing, and Syrian refugees alike. Through the lens of this epic theatrical journey, Dromgoole gleans new insight into Shakespeare's masterpiece, exploring the play's history, its meaning, and its pleasures, and offering a dramatic and heartfelt testament to Shakespeare's enduring presence on the modern stage.
400 pages, Paperback
First published April 26, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 76 reviews
July 2, 2017
I was so excited about reading this book that I formed an ad hoc book group with my daughter and two of our friends to read and discuss it together. It was a good book, but not what I expected.
The book is about the Globe Theater’s ambitious project to present Hamlet in every country in the world over a period of two years. They came really close, missing only 2 countries (North Korea and the second one escapes me). They even performed in refugee camps. Their goal was to bring the play not just to elite audiences, but to the people of all the world’s culture.
I thought the author would say more about how the presentation of Hamlet was impacted by the location where the actors performed it, and how the play itself was interpreted differently by different cultures. There was a little of that. For example, some Cambodians, seeing a poster of Yorick’s skull, assumed that the play would be about the Khmer Rouge. The theme of one king ousting another resonated in Ukraine, where a Russia-aligned national leader had recently been replaced by a pro-West leader.
I was also interested in how the language itself translated, especially in light of the author’s statement early on that he has a commitment to precision of language (something that I am also passionate about). But there was very little of that also. He never even says how the language barriers were overcome. He passingly mentions a translator in Mexico, so they must have had translators, but I’d have loved to hear more about how that worked out.
Instead, the book is mostly a sort of travelogue/memoir. It’s very well-written and most of the stories are interesting and sometimes humorous. But I wanted the book to really be about Hamlet and the world, and it was mostly a self-congratulatory 365 pages about the impressions and experiences of one very privileged white guy.
One final note: If you are ever in London, do not miss the experience of very-inexpensive "groundling" tickets to the Globe. It was absolutely the highlight of our trip to England in 2015.
Like my reviews? Check out my blog at http://www.kathrynbashaar.com/blog/
Author of The Saint’s Mistress: https://www.amazon.com/Saints-Mistres...
The book is about the Globe Theater’s ambitious project to present Hamlet in every country in the world over a period of two years. They came really close, missing only 2 countries (North Korea and the second one escapes me). They even performed in refugee camps. Their goal was to bring the play not just to elite audiences, but to the people of all the world’s culture.
I thought the author would say more about how the presentation of Hamlet was impacted by the location where the actors performed it, and how the play itself was interpreted differently by different cultures. There was a little of that. For example, some Cambodians, seeing a poster of Yorick’s skull, assumed that the play would be about the Khmer Rouge. The theme of one king ousting another resonated in Ukraine, where a Russia-aligned national leader had recently been replaced by a pro-West leader.
I was also interested in how the language itself translated, especially in light of the author’s statement early on that he has a commitment to precision of language (something that I am also passionate about). But there was very little of that also. He never even says how the language barriers were overcome. He passingly mentions a translator in Mexico, so they must have had translators, but I’d have loved to hear more about how that worked out.
Instead, the book is mostly a sort of travelogue/memoir. It’s very well-written and most of the stories are interesting and sometimes humorous. But I wanted the book to really be about Hamlet and the world, and it was mostly a self-congratulatory 365 pages about the impressions and experiences of one very privileged white guy.
One final note: If you are ever in London, do not miss the experience of very-inexpensive "groundling" tickets to the Globe. It was absolutely the highlight of our trip to England in 2015.
Like my reviews? Check out my blog at http://www.kathrynbashaar.com/blog/
Author of The Saint’s Mistress: https://www.amazon.com/Saints-Mistres...
May 11, 2017
This book should be good. It is not. The gap between Sentence No. 1 and Sentence No. 2 contains multitudes.
The biggest flaw is the premise, which is pure bait-and-switch. The book ought to be -- claims to be! -- the story of a theater troupe's journey around the world, sharing Shakespeare's greatest (. . . ?) play with people in every country on earth. It is in fact the story of how that trip seemed from the perspective of an executive who was in London the whole time, except for the occasional trip out to a particularly picturesque spot on the itinerary. (And oh by the way the tour didn't actually go to every country, but hey nobody's perfect and my man Dominic HAD already pitched the tour and written the book proposal, so no harm no foul, right?)
An engaging writer could have elided these problems, and Dromgoole does his best. His thoughts on the text and production of Hamlet are great, just as you might expect from a decorated theatrical impresario. His thoughts on travel, geography, politics, relationships, climate, conversation, and a hundred other topics are ... not great -- just as you might expect from a decorated theatrical impresario!
The reader's wandering interest can be held to the page by the anticipation of the next offhand reference to world events, invariably either wrong-headed (Ukraine's self-defense against Russian aggression, we're told, is all about how "Face was lost in the Crimea," an international force on anti-piracy duty in Djibouti is "Really bad Special Forces") or parodically self-centered (the aftermath of the Bataclan massacre "made everyone [in the troupe] nervous," a suicide bomber kills 65 people in Pakistan "before we arrived," "there was an escalation in terror in Bangladesh around our dates"). Department of Small Favors: I spent 371 pages dreading that Dromgoole was about to start declaiming on the Israel-Palestine peace process, and that speech mercifully never came.
Like this review, the book is self-indulgent, self-righteous, and lacking clear focus. Unlike this review, the book is inexplicably blurbed by people who should no better.
The biggest flaw is the premise, which is pure bait-and-switch. The book ought to be -- claims to be! -- the story of a theater troupe's journey around the world, sharing Shakespeare's greatest (. . . ?) play with people in every country on earth. It is in fact the story of how that trip seemed from the perspective of an executive who was in London the whole time, except for the occasional trip out to a particularly picturesque spot on the itinerary. (And oh by the way the tour didn't actually go to every country, but hey nobody's perfect and my man Dominic HAD already pitched the tour and written the book proposal, so no harm no foul, right?)
An engaging writer could have elided these problems, and Dromgoole does his best. His thoughts on the text and production of Hamlet are great, just as you might expect from a decorated theatrical impresario. His thoughts on travel, geography, politics, relationships, climate, conversation, and a hundred other topics are ... not great -- just as you might expect from a decorated theatrical impresario!
The reader's wandering interest can be held to the page by the anticipation of the next offhand reference to world events, invariably either wrong-headed (Ukraine's self-defense against Russian aggression, we're told, is all about how "Face was lost in the Crimea," an international force on anti-piracy duty in Djibouti is "Really bad Special Forces") or parodically self-centered (the aftermath of the Bataclan massacre "made everyone [in the troupe] nervous," a suicide bomber kills 65 people in Pakistan "before we arrived," "there was an escalation in terror in Bangladesh around our dates"). Department of Small Favors: I spent 371 pages dreading that Dromgoole was about to start declaiming on the Israel-Palestine peace process, and that speech mercifully never came.
Like this review, the book is self-indulgent, self-righteous, and lacking clear focus. Unlike this review, the book is inexplicably blurbed by people who should no better.
January 10, 2017
'Hamlet: Globe to Globe' by Dominic Dromgoole
4 stars/ 8 out of 10
I first read and also saw a live performance of 'Hamlet' when I was at school (more than 50 years ago). At that time I neither liked nor understood the play.
It was not until last year that I re-read the play, wanting to better understand the references to 'Hamlet' that occur in Ulysses. Shortly after this, I went to see a live streaming of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2016 production of 'Hamlet'. Both of these occurrences were revelations. I, at last, saw the relevance and importance of this play.
Hence, I was very interested in reading Dominic Dromgoole's book about the Globe Theatre's journey (in several senses) to take a performance of Hamlet to every country in the world.
I found this book to be extremely interesting. Each of the 18 chapters includes a section relating to the performance in a specific country, a section relating to Hamlet and/or Shakespeare, and a more general section relating to Dromgoole's interests and musings. I enjoyed all three sections, although on the odd occasion I found some of the generalising less to my liking. However, I found these digressions more interesting as the book progressed.
The highlights for me (country-wise) were: Mexico, where the company were hit by illness; the background information about Nauru; performing in Cambodia and the significance of the skull in that country; and an excellent chapter concerning Peru.
Other things that interested me include information about the early different versions of Hamlet, the musings about scaffolding, and the elderly visitor to the performance in Addis Ababa. The greatest find for me in this book is the Somali poet Hadrawi, whose work I intend to follow up.
Thank you to Canongate Books and to NetGalley for an ARC.
June 16, 2018
This seems to be a year of fundamentally mis-marketed books. This is not a book about the Globe to Globe Hamlet tour that visited nearly every country in the world over the course of two years. It’s a book about Hamlet and Dominic Dromgoole’s relationship to Hamlet, which happens to include some stories about the Globe to Globe tour. Really, it should be called The Prince and I: Hamlet, the Globe, and the Play, or something like that.
If they actually wanted a book about the tour, it might have helped to pick an author who went on the tour. Dromgoogle was one of the directions of the production, and also in charge of the Globe at the time, but he only visited 20 of the stops on the tour. His stories about those stops are so interesting that I yearned to hear from the people who visited each one.
This book has one of the stronger narrative voices I’ve encountered; it’s really hard to review it without reviewing the author, too, so I’m not going to try. The overwhelming impression I got of Dromgoole in this book is that he’s the sort of man who always has an interesting story to tell, an interesting thought to convey, and if you say to him, “Dominic, we’re ordering dinner. What toppings do you want on your pizza?” you get a three hour dicussion that inevitably ends, “This is great, Dominic, but we HAVE TO ORDER DINNER.” He’s somewhere beyond discursive. And that really shows in the book. (He’s also quite catty. I bet at least five of the stories he would tell in that three-hour dinner run up would be tales on specific people, and he’d be happy to name the names, too.)
Fortunately, Dromgoole mostly manages to stay on topic in the book, largely because he thinks Hamlet is maybe the most interesting topic in the world. And he does even manage to connect his meditations on the play back to the tour in most cases. (He does not, however, manage to do this in chronological order. And the list of tour stops that interleaves each chapter is irrelevant, which frustrated the heck out of me.)
All in all, this is an interesting book if you’re looking for one man’s thoughts on Hamlet (and Shakespeare, who Dromgoole seemst to regard as a close friend recently deceased). If you’re looking for a travelogue, or details of HOW they managed to get from country to country and do a play in each one, or what it was like to be on this trip, then — well, this is not the book for you. I did find it interesting, but it left me wanting a book that does what this one says it does on the cover. I will just have to hope that one of the actors or stage managers involved writes a book, too.
If they actually wanted a book about the tour, it might have helped to pick an author who went on the tour. Dromgoogle was one of the directions of the production, and also in charge of the Globe at the time, but he only visited 20 of the stops on the tour. His stories about those stops are so interesting that I yearned to hear from the people who visited each one.
This book has one of the stronger narrative voices I’ve encountered; it’s really hard to review it without reviewing the author, too, so I’m not going to try. The overwhelming impression I got of Dromgoole in this book is that he’s the sort of man who always has an interesting story to tell, an interesting thought to convey, and if you say to him, “Dominic, we’re ordering dinner. What toppings do you want on your pizza?” you get a three hour dicussion that inevitably ends, “This is great, Dominic, but we HAVE TO ORDER DINNER.” He’s somewhere beyond discursive. And that really shows in the book. (He’s also quite catty. I bet at least five of the stories he would tell in that three-hour dinner run up would be tales on specific people, and he’d be happy to name the names, too.)
Fortunately, Dromgoole mostly manages to stay on topic in the book, largely because he thinks Hamlet is maybe the most interesting topic in the world. And he does even manage to connect his meditations on the play back to the tour in most cases. (He does not, however, manage to do this in chronological order. And the list of tour stops that interleaves each chapter is irrelevant, which frustrated the heck out of me.)
All in all, this is an interesting book if you’re looking for one man’s thoughts on Hamlet (and Shakespeare, who Dromgoole seemst to regard as a close friend recently deceased). If you’re looking for a travelogue, or details of HOW they managed to get from country to country and do a play in each one, or what it was like to be on this trip, then — well, this is not the book for you. I did find it interesting, but it left me wanting a book that does what this one says it does on the cover. I will just have to hope that one of the actors or stage managers involved writes a book, too.
March 7, 2025
I have studied Hamlet most of my life, first a student, then in my dissertation, later as a teacher, and always as a mystery. Dromgoole of course shares my curiosity, but adds an astronomically higher level of familiarity, as this subtitle sums. While initially the casual tone, the fanboy Obama and facile praise heaped on Hamilton's performance, the predictable digs at certain politicians as current alas now as nearly a decade ago given the Ukrainian conflicts, and the posturing endemic to the creative class who dominate the media and the arts all rankled, amidst unnecessary f-bombs from someone well into middle-age (and I appear his peer here), his acumen for articulate analyses swayed even me.
For Dromgoole (if inconsistently; the style betrays a job left either well past deadlines or too long on the shelf) at his best integrates the contexts within which the global tour took place, now of this review near ten years beforehand, with tough questions about revenge, as in Cambodia, war plotted in the killing fields of the Islamic State, the university vs the facade erected in Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, the magic realism in Colombia, the BBC and academic distaste for any trace, ironically, of English pride in the legacy of Shakespeare, or the Great Eastern Rift of Africa overlaying tribes and borders.
Suffice to say he opens up intelligence and insight. He expects you know the plot, but on the other hand, he inserts key passages to refresh your memory when he explicates crucial textual matters. Given his few actors switched roles, adapted interpretations, and responded to their wildly divergent demands in hauling this all over the planet, their imaginary and practical demands earn my respect.
Although the conundrum I always would present to my classes, whether Gertrude is privy to the secret Claudius hides and Prince Hamlet learns from his father's spirit, remains unsaid within these pages. Which satisfied me. It's a briskly told but very rambling mishmash of travelogue, anecdotes, cattiness, criticism, and morning-after jetlag, bad food (a grimly hilarious outbreak of Montesinos' Revenge in Mexico City the nadir), and mistranslations. But the cast and crew appear to have partied plenty...
Alterwards, this report needed another go in editing, as the author admits he composed it well after the whirlwind had subsided, and it feels more a rush of recollections amidst a less than rigorous look at the factors tying the set to the settings, as it were, Dromgoole manages to pack enough substance into the mix to balance the filler. But the chapters veer about almost maniacally, and the itinerary is not matched neatly within the respective sections. Organization and pace both suffer, and confuse.
Yet an object, but not abject, lesson in how the legacy of one Dead White Man endures, survives its staging even among audiences lacking English, and inspires a truly diverse and inclusive ensemble in an inarguably multicultural range of audiences to take if not easy comfort than life lessons about I estimate about all of the profound issues that someone 450+ years ago could conjure up for us today.
For Dromgoole (if inconsistently; the style betrays a job left either well past deadlines or too long on the shelf) at his best integrates the contexts within which the global tour took place, now of this review near ten years beforehand, with tough questions about revenge, as in Cambodia, war plotted in the killing fields of the Islamic State, the university vs the facade erected in Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, the magic realism in Colombia, the BBC and academic distaste for any trace, ironically, of English pride in the legacy of Shakespeare, or the Great Eastern Rift of Africa overlaying tribes and borders.
Suffice to say he opens up intelligence and insight. He expects you know the plot, but on the other hand, he inserts key passages to refresh your memory when he explicates crucial textual matters. Given his few actors switched roles, adapted interpretations, and responded to their wildly divergent demands in hauling this all over the planet, their imaginary and practical demands earn my respect.
Although the conundrum I always would present to my classes, whether Gertrude is privy to the secret Claudius hides and Prince Hamlet learns from his father's spirit, remains unsaid within these pages. Which satisfied me. It's a briskly told but very rambling mishmash of travelogue, anecdotes, cattiness, criticism, and morning-after jetlag, bad food (a grimly hilarious outbreak of Montesinos' Revenge in Mexico City the nadir), and mistranslations. But the cast and crew appear to have partied plenty...
Alterwards, this report needed another go in editing, as the author admits he composed it well after the whirlwind had subsided, and it feels more a rush of recollections amidst a less than rigorous look at the factors tying the set to the settings, as it were, Dromgoole manages to pack enough substance into the mix to balance the filler. But the chapters veer about almost maniacally, and the itinerary is not matched neatly within the respective sections. Organization and pace both suffer, and confuse.
Yet an object, but not abject, lesson in how the legacy of one Dead White Man endures, survives its staging even among audiences lacking English, and inspires a truly diverse and inclusive ensemble in an inarguably multicultural range of audiences to take if not easy comfort than life lessons about I estimate about all of the profound issues that someone 450+ years ago could conjure up for us today.
February 7, 2018
If you're not a fan of Hamlet, you'll obviously want to pass on this book. The author himself didn't go on the whole tour so there isn't as much about the tour as I would like. It was really neat to learn about the different interpretations they did along the tour (such as a female Hamlet) but it felt like there was too much of the author and his feelings than the general tour. Overall, a good read if you're a fan of this play.
December 31, 2016
I’m going to end the year with a recommendation for your reading lists in 2017. Although it won’t be published until April, this book offers an optimistic note of hope to banish the darkness of what has, by any stretch of the imagination, been a bleak year. The context is this. Back in 2012, Shakespeare was at the heart of the cultural festival that accompanied the London Olympics. The main feature was the ambitious Globe to Globe festival, during which every one of Shakespeare’s plays was performed, each by a company from a different country, each in a different language. Buzzing from the success of that project, the team were looking for their next big adventure. And it was Dominic Dromgoole, then director of the Globe, who came up with a crazy idea during a genial away day. Why not tour Hamlet to every country in the world? ...
For the rest of the review, please visit my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2016/12/31/h...
For the rest of the review, please visit my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2016/12/31/h...
June 14, 2020
When looking for a new project, the director of Shakespeare's Globe in London came up with the wild idea of taking one of the Bard's plays on a tour of every country of the world. He set about creating a company that would be prepared to spend the next two years visiting 190 countries and sharing Hamlet with the world. Dromgoole has an easygoing writing style filled with wit and warmth and it makes this book a delight to read. Lots of interesting stories from performing in Mexico with gastroenteritis to being asked for money by the Queen of Palau!! Anybody who loves Shakespeare, theatre or travel will enjoy reading of the company's exploits.
December 28, 2017
An intriguing look at "Hamlet" with fun anecdotes about staging the play in every country in the world. Impressive writing, but some of the author's analysis of the play got bogged down and repetitive--hence only 4 stars.
February 5, 2017
Hamlet: Globe to Globe is a book about a huge project and one that those interested in Shakespearean theatre in the UK and beyond probably have heard about: Shakespeare’s Globe theatre took Hamlet on a tour to, as far as possible, every country in the world. In this book, Dominic Dromgoole describes their endeavours alongside thoughts on Hamlet and performing the play around the globe. Part memoir and part book about Hamlet and performance, Hamlet: Globe to Globe gives a sense of the excitement of the project whilst telling anecdotes about the reality of the undertaking.
Each chapter is focused around a theme and jumps between anecdotes about the tour and certain countries and Dromgoole’s discussions about Hamlet, which are fairly light and open, focused on character and performance. His vision of Hamlet as elusive and protean, as a play that should be less revered than actively used, fits with the book and project, suggesting that the play was right to be performed around the world in English. Whilst Dromgoole gives a rather romanticised image of Hamlet as a play at the beginning of the book, throughout the book he emphasises how it worked differently at different points in the tour, suggesting that he believes his romantic image of Hamlet as universal play full of human themes.
The specific anecdotes are the best part of the book, from playing in refugee camps and in hostile environments to the company doing speeches at the Globe in front of Obama. Political context is given for some of the performances and, though not perfect, shows an appreciation for the histories and contexts in which they ended up bringing their production. Descriptions of rotational casting practices and rehearsal methods adds theatrical interest, as does information about how they worked around some of the more difficult venue issues.
Hamlet: Globe to Globe is a subjective, endearing description of a touring production, one which accepts with self-deprecation that originally they naively believed they could change the world, but instead discovered that the world was a turbulent and difficult place, much like the world of the play.
Each chapter is focused around a theme and jumps between anecdotes about the tour and certain countries and Dromgoole’s discussions about Hamlet, which are fairly light and open, focused on character and performance. His vision of Hamlet as elusive and protean, as a play that should be less revered than actively used, fits with the book and project, suggesting that the play was right to be performed around the world in English. Whilst Dromgoole gives a rather romanticised image of Hamlet as a play at the beginning of the book, throughout the book he emphasises how it worked differently at different points in the tour, suggesting that he believes his romantic image of Hamlet as universal play full of human themes.
The specific anecdotes are the best part of the book, from playing in refugee camps and in hostile environments to the company doing speeches at the Globe in front of Obama. Political context is given for some of the performances and, though not perfect, shows an appreciation for the histories and contexts in which they ended up bringing their production. Descriptions of rotational casting practices and rehearsal methods adds theatrical interest, as does information about how they worked around some of the more difficult venue issues.
Hamlet: Globe to Globe is a subjective, endearing description of a touring production, one which accepts with self-deprecation that originally they naively believed they could change the world, but instead discovered that the world was a turbulent and difficult place, much like the world of the play.
January 20, 2021
"Overwhelmed by these thoughts in that scattered age between eighteen and twenty-five, it was then that Hamlet gripped me."
Four stars for the Hamlet, two stars for the Globe to Globe. I found the literary criticism angle genuinely profound and insightful, which means something when you're writing about a play that's been overanalyzed on the same set of rails for centuries. The commentary on production history, especially the chapter on women past and present playing Hamlet, was fascinating.
The flip side is I found the author's musings on traveling to different countries (let alone his commentary on geopolitics and cultural difference) overly simplistic and sentimental. Unfortunately, these were the sections that were accorded the most time. Perhaps there is a case to be made here for writers sticking to what they know best (bear those ills you have!) rather than flying to topics where their contributions have little to back them up.
I really want to give a five-star review to a book that revolves around Shakespeare's Globe in London, my favorite theater in the world... but I'm willing to wait for Michelle Terry's eventual memoir.
Four stars for the Hamlet, two stars for the Globe to Globe. I found the literary criticism angle genuinely profound and insightful, which means something when you're writing about a play that's been overanalyzed on the same set of rails for centuries. The commentary on production history, especially the chapter on women past and present playing Hamlet, was fascinating.
The flip side is I found the author's musings on traveling to different countries (let alone his commentary on geopolitics and cultural difference) overly simplistic and sentimental. Unfortunately, these were the sections that were accorded the most time. Perhaps there is a case to be made here for writers sticking to what they know best (bear those ills you have!) rather than flying to topics where their contributions have little to back them up.
I really want to give a five-star review to a book that revolves around Shakespeare's Globe in London, my favorite theater in the world... but I'm willing to wait for Michelle Terry's eventual memoir.
January 24, 2017
I recommend this book as a life student, who has spent time at University, to all especially those studying Hamlet for an award. This book not only reveals the highs and lows of taking Shakespeare on a world tour but also a lot that may not be obvious about the play itself. This includes time spent on the main characters including why Hamlet should be played by a female and the monologue 'to be or not to be'.
I was given this book by Netgalley and this is my voluntary review.
I was given this book by Netgalley and this is my voluntary review.
December 6, 2025
In the year 2014, the Globe theatre put on "one of the most ambitious touring productions in history" as the Daily Beast put it. They decided to perform Shakespeare’s Hamlet in every country on earth, all 290 or so of them. It was an exceptional challenge, and, excepting a few countries, they pulled it off in two years. This was the outcome.
"Hamlet is a unique play in the canon of world drama. Loose, baggy, sometimes unwieldy, constructed from a known story and a previous play, its many details improvised from the pained and beautiful stuff within Shakespeare's soul, it ranges across a northern European landscape dominated by a gloomy castle and splashed by a cold sea crashing on rocks. It is a landscape struck by more flashes of lightning coming from many directions - linguistic brilliance, psychological insight, political acuity, mythic resonance and simple family truth. Together they combine to create a statement about what it is to be human that has never been surpassed, both in the age it was written for and since." (3)
"Each country has thrown fresh light on the play, its large themes and its smaller nooks and crannies, just as this protean play has been able to throw light on the world and its many faces. The tour changed my view of the play, the play changed my understanding of the tour, and both shifted my perspectives on the world and on myself.. I have tried to set down some of this dialogue between the play and the world, to see how each illuminated the other." (9)
Dromgoole delivers on this promise. In each chapter, he brings up a theme of the play and shows how the tour and the play were in dialogue with one another. The most interesting comparisons were between the skulls of the Khmer Rouge and those of Yorrick’s (ch. 8), The history of the female Hamlets and the first professional show on the Saudi Arabian stage featuring both men and women (ch. 11), the Revolutions in Ukraine and in Hamlet (ch. 12), Hamlet’s desire for revenge and the desire to revenge those in northern Iraq who suffered brutally at the hands of ISIS (ch 13), and the consciousness of the crew and of Hamlet of their own mortality in the ruins and sandstorm in Zaatari (ch. 16). Dromgoole’s unique contribution to my understanding of the play came from his experience as a stage manager and historian of Hamlet performances. In the end, one definitely resonate with Droomgoole's comment on “The rest is silence.” “If there is one thing that Hamlet has not been since his first death in 1601, it is silent. He has reincarnated, and his words have been quoted and recited more often than any dramatic character.” (357)
I share some insightful quotes below.
"Top of the Frequently Asked Questions as we set out on this adventure was 'Why Hamlet?" We flirted with other titles ... [.] A Midsummer Night's Dream has an unsurpassable flight and grace, but an actor squeezing into a tattered fairy costume a year down the road might have been disheartened; Twelfth Night is not robust enough of tone to survive the exigencies of touring; and King Lear is just too dark. Romeo and Juliet was a clear candidate because of its iconic status, but the play is structurally broken-backed. Packed with beautiful poetry and a searing story, it loses its way after the death of Mercutio and never quite regains it until the end. Carrying that Fourth Act around the world would have been dispiriting. Also, and this is the weightiest problem, Romeo and Juliet reveals its own meanings after a brief search. Six months in, and the company would have uncovered its secrets. They would have known what they were playing, which is fatal. If the tour was to be a valuable journey for the company, and thus for audiences, the play had to remain eulsive. This was guaranteed with Hamlet." (14)
“Producing Shakespeare has always relied more than anything on joy, on innocence and on enthusiasm. But try arguing for those three at a congress of Shakespeare scholars.” (193)
I found some Historical Trivia interesting.
“Every show at the first Globe - even a tragedy - would end with a jig, where the whole company danced together. In the original Globe, they would interrupt the dance, and the comedian in the company would tell jokes.”
“The moniker ‘Comedians of England’ provides a clue as to their playing style. There is evidence the plays were substantially cut, and that broad farce, music and gymnastic feats were highlighted over delicate psychological acting. Hamlet, as we can surmise from contemporary accounts and from early translations, would probably have run at about an hour, with an extended dumbshow, and with incidents like the killing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern played out in graphic fight sequences rather than reported. The kings of the companies were the clowns, who had to bilingual so they could crack local jokes and bridge complicated narrative jumps with a little live storytelling. … We know the names of almost a hundred English actors working across Europe during this period, …[.] Amongst the list of actors are some distinguished names, including Ben Johnson and (from Shakespeare’s company) Will Kempe, George Byran and Thomas Pope. The last two both spent time working in Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, which is a substantial clue as to how Shakespeare knew so much of the places he wrote about…"
"Throughout the journeys, and in planning them, we talked of their correspondence to the first journeys that Shakespeare's plays had made as they sailed from London to tak their chance in the world, carried in the memory of actors. The most celebrated instance of this early promulgation by water involves Hamlet and is problematic. It was the iconic performance of Hamlet on board the Red Dragon off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1608. According to the notebooks of their captain William Keeling, they performced Hamlet twice in teh course of their journy around the globe between 1607 and 1610. The crew, many of whom had no doubt seen the show at the Globe, used the mnemonic capacity of their age and stitched a show together for a group of visiting dignitaries from the African mainland. The exoticism of this - as such a distance from home, and so soon after its premere - leads many, including us, to blazon it as proof of the speed at which Hamlet moved into the world. We accpt the internationalism of Shakespeare as a commonplace, but assume it's a modern development; in fact, it's as old as the plays themselves. Yet a historical shadow falls across the performance. The Red dragon was one of the first ships of the East India Company. The juxtaposition of Shakespeare, the most pervasive soft-power influence of all time, with the great-great-grandfather of all psychopathic corporations is an uneasy one." (53)
“Arriving at the venue [in Cambodia], one of the first questions asked by a technician was, ‘IS this play about the Khmer Rouge?” He was pointing at a poster showing Hamlet holding Yorrick’s skull. For many countries this image [of Hamlet holding Yorrick’s skull] is an iconic reference to a play; here it is recent history. The Khmer Rouge created their own iconography of slaughter, scattering skulls across the land and piling them up in cairns which dotted the landscape.” (152)
“One of the Many source stories for Hamlet includes a Danish legend from the twelfth century which claims that Hamlet was actually a woman, and that his/her mum had hidden his/her identity to secure his/her claim to the throne. Hamlet could not even come into existence without being shrouded in ambiguity.” (204)
Some of his comments on the play were insightful.
1.1. "Who's There?" "Unless the director is very eccentric, ... Barnado will be looking out front. The question immediately includes and excludes everyone watching. It makes them participatory because addressed, and shuts them out because the soldier cannot see ... them. ... Two syllables and immediate unease."
2.2 “The only rule of thumb for playing Hamlet’s soliloquies, above and beyond clarity, is never to teach and always to learn. If you arrive with your thoughts pre-packaged before you start speaking, then unfurl them for the benefit of your audience, you are dead before you start.” (Dromgoole 172)
2.2 “All around the world, when our Hamlets asked the question ‘Am I a coward?”, they … found someone in the audience, looked into their eyes, and pinned them back with the question. Sometimes people looked away, embarrassed, sometimes they offered support, often people replied ‘No.’ Whatever fourth wall remained by that point dissolved, and we the audience were in an open conversation with our leading man. The moment was electric, a gap of silence when we did not know how the story would proceed. (Dromgoole 177)
3.2 3.2 “Speak the speech, I pray you… Purpose of playing.” “These words … they have been the ultimate rule book, which generation after generation of actors since, have done their level best to ignore.” (Dromgoole 33)
3.3. Hamlet the play works on a double axis in relation to killing. One character, Hamlet, is spooled inexorably towards an act of murder, a thread reeled in ineluctably towards the strike of the act. Another character, Claudius, we watch unspooling away from his crime, his certainty and confidence unraveling as the play progresses. The moment in which Hamlet pauses before deciding not to kill Claudius is the moment, right in the golden section of the play, where the two axes intersect.” (Dromgoole 154-155)
[Hamlet] is so negatively defined by what he is not, and what he is unable to become - he cannot become the king, he cannot return to Wittenberg to be a student, he cannot fulfill his desire to be Ophelia’s lover, he is incapable of becoming the man of action his father’s spirit wants him to be - all this inability to achieve clarity as a person leaves room for interpreters to sketch their own shape. (Dromgoole 205)
“Denmark, though it has an act of definitive rottenness at its core, and seems messy and stumbly, is not the bleak antechamber to hell of Macbeth’s Scotland, or the blasted loveless dysfunction of Lear’s England. When Shakespeare wanted to write a proper dystopia, he did. With Elsinore, he has the brakes on.”
"Hamlet is a unique play in the canon of world drama. Loose, baggy, sometimes unwieldy, constructed from a known story and a previous play, its many details improvised from the pained and beautiful stuff within Shakespeare's soul, it ranges across a northern European landscape dominated by a gloomy castle and splashed by a cold sea crashing on rocks. It is a landscape struck by more flashes of lightning coming from many directions - linguistic brilliance, psychological insight, political acuity, mythic resonance and simple family truth. Together they combine to create a statement about what it is to be human that has never been surpassed, both in the age it was written for and since." (3)
"Each country has thrown fresh light on the play, its large themes and its smaller nooks and crannies, just as this protean play has been able to throw light on the world and its many faces. The tour changed my view of the play, the play changed my understanding of the tour, and both shifted my perspectives on the world and on myself.. I have tried to set down some of this dialogue between the play and the world, to see how each illuminated the other." (9)
Dromgoole delivers on this promise. In each chapter, he brings up a theme of the play and shows how the tour and the play were in dialogue with one another. The most interesting comparisons were between the skulls of the Khmer Rouge and those of Yorrick’s (ch. 8), The history of the female Hamlets and the first professional show on the Saudi Arabian stage featuring both men and women (ch. 11), the Revolutions in Ukraine and in Hamlet (ch. 12), Hamlet’s desire for revenge and the desire to revenge those in northern Iraq who suffered brutally at the hands of ISIS (ch 13), and the consciousness of the crew and of Hamlet of their own mortality in the ruins and sandstorm in Zaatari (ch. 16). Dromgoole’s unique contribution to my understanding of the play came from his experience as a stage manager and historian of Hamlet performances. In the end, one definitely resonate with Droomgoole's comment on “The rest is silence.” “If there is one thing that Hamlet has not been since his first death in 1601, it is silent. He has reincarnated, and his words have been quoted and recited more often than any dramatic character.” (357)
I share some insightful quotes below.
"Top of the Frequently Asked Questions as we set out on this adventure was 'Why Hamlet?" We flirted with other titles ... [.] A Midsummer Night's Dream has an unsurpassable flight and grace, but an actor squeezing into a tattered fairy costume a year down the road might have been disheartened; Twelfth Night is not robust enough of tone to survive the exigencies of touring; and King Lear is just too dark. Romeo and Juliet was a clear candidate because of its iconic status, but the play is structurally broken-backed. Packed with beautiful poetry and a searing story, it loses its way after the death of Mercutio and never quite regains it until the end. Carrying that Fourth Act around the world would have been dispiriting. Also, and this is the weightiest problem, Romeo and Juliet reveals its own meanings after a brief search. Six months in, and the company would have uncovered its secrets. They would have known what they were playing, which is fatal. If the tour was to be a valuable journey for the company, and thus for audiences, the play had to remain eulsive. This was guaranteed with Hamlet." (14)
“Producing Shakespeare has always relied more than anything on joy, on innocence and on enthusiasm. But try arguing for those three at a congress of Shakespeare scholars.” (193)
I found some Historical Trivia interesting.
“Every show at the first Globe - even a tragedy - would end with a jig, where the whole company danced together. In the original Globe, they would interrupt the dance, and the comedian in the company would tell jokes.”
“The moniker ‘Comedians of England’ provides a clue as to their playing style. There is evidence the plays were substantially cut, and that broad farce, music and gymnastic feats were highlighted over delicate psychological acting. Hamlet, as we can surmise from contemporary accounts and from early translations, would probably have run at about an hour, with an extended dumbshow, and with incidents like the killing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern played out in graphic fight sequences rather than reported. The kings of the companies were the clowns, who had to bilingual so they could crack local jokes and bridge complicated narrative jumps with a little live storytelling. … We know the names of almost a hundred English actors working across Europe during this period, …[.] Amongst the list of actors are some distinguished names, including Ben Johnson and (from Shakespeare’s company) Will Kempe, George Byran and Thomas Pope. The last two both spent time working in Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, which is a substantial clue as to how Shakespeare knew so much of the places he wrote about…"
"Throughout the journeys, and in planning them, we talked of their correspondence to the first journeys that Shakespeare's plays had made as they sailed from London to tak their chance in the world, carried in the memory of actors. The most celebrated instance of this early promulgation by water involves Hamlet and is problematic. It was the iconic performance of Hamlet on board the Red Dragon off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1608. According to the notebooks of their captain William Keeling, they performced Hamlet twice in teh course of their journy around the globe between 1607 and 1610. The crew, many of whom had no doubt seen the show at the Globe, used the mnemonic capacity of their age and stitched a show together for a group of visiting dignitaries from the African mainland. The exoticism of this - as such a distance from home, and so soon after its premere - leads many, including us, to blazon it as proof of the speed at which Hamlet moved into the world. We accpt the internationalism of Shakespeare as a commonplace, but assume it's a modern development; in fact, it's as old as the plays themselves. Yet a historical shadow falls across the performance. The Red dragon was one of the first ships of the East India Company. The juxtaposition of Shakespeare, the most pervasive soft-power influence of all time, with the great-great-grandfather of all psychopathic corporations is an uneasy one." (53)
“Arriving at the venue [in Cambodia], one of the first questions asked by a technician was, ‘IS this play about the Khmer Rouge?” He was pointing at a poster showing Hamlet holding Yorrick’s skull. For many countries this image [of Hamlet holding Yorrick’s skull] is an iconic reference to a play; here it is recent history. The Khmer Rouge created their own iconography of slaughter, scattering skulls across the land and piling them up in cairns which dotted the landscape.” (152)
“One of the Many source stories for Hamlet includes a Danish legend from the twelfth century which claims that Hamlet was actually a woman, and that his/her mum had hidden his/her identity to secure his/her claim to the throne. Hamlet could not even come into existence without being shrouded in ambiguity.” (204)
Some of his comments on the play were insightful.
1.1. "Who's There?" "Unless the director is very eccentric, ... Barnado will be looking out front. The question immediately includes and excludes everyone watching. It makes them participatory because addressed, and shuts them out because the soldier cannot see ... them. ... Two syllables and immediate unease."
2.2 “The only rule of thumb for playing Hamlet’s soliloquies, above and beyond clarity, is never to teach and always to learn. If you arrive with your thoughts pre-packaged before you start speaking, then unfurl them for the benefit of your audience, you are dead before you start.” (Dromgoole 172)
2.2 “All around the world, when our Hamlets asked the question ‘Am I a coward?”, they … found someone in the audience, looked into their eyes, and pinned them back with the question. Sometimes people looked away, embarrassed, sometimes they offered support, often people replied ‘No.’ Whatever fourth wall remained by that point dissolved, and we the audience were in an open conversation with our leading man. The moment was electric, a gap of silence when we did not know how the story would proceed. (Dromgoole 177)
3.2 3.2 “Speak the speech, I pray you… Purpose of playing.” “These words … they have been the ultimate rule book, which generation after generation of actors since, have done their level best to ignore.” (Dromgoole 33)
3.3. Hamlet the play works on a double axis in relation to killing. One character, Hamlet, is spooled inexorably towards an act of murder, a thread reeled in ineluctably towards the strike of the act. Another character, Claudius, we watch unspooling away from his crime, his certainty and confidence unraveling as the play progresses. The moment in which Hamlet pauses before deciding not to kill Claudius is the moment, right in the golden section of the play, where the two axes intersect.” (Dromgoole 154-155)
[Hamlet] is so negatively defined by what he is not, and what he is unable to become - he cannot become the king, he cannot return to Wittenberg to be a student, he cannot fulfill his desire to be Ophelia’s lover, he is incapable of becoming the man of action his father’s spirit wants him to be - all this inability to achieve clarity as a person leaves room for interpreters to sketch their own shape. (Dromgoole 205)
“Denmark, though it has an act of definitive rottenness at its core, and seems messy and stumbly, is not the bleak antechamber to hell of Macbeth’s Scotland, or the blasted loveless dysfunction of Lear’s England. When Shakespeare wanted to write a proper dystopia, he did. With Elsinore, he has the brakes on.”
May 22, 2017
An incredible journey! Traveling through three countries per week for two years performing a five Act Hamlet? How is that possible, even real? and then to have a published hardcover book in lieu of this journey is the eye of the apple. I remember a parable in which Atlas was a sucker for apples and it appears that his subsequent Dromgoole stepped away from holding up the Globe to write this book too; filled with apples. Which is to say that Dromgoole is like Atlas but he can be easily distracted too.
Alexander Pope claims in his Essay on Criticism that wit and judgment often are at strife, “Tho’ meant each other’s aid, like man and wife.” Going with the metaphor - Hamlet intends on getting married to the throne of Denmark– right? I don’t think that can be left out.
Somehow there’s a tarmac skid-noise metaphor - I would’ve cued the tarmac-skid immediately after he says in chapter 15: “the plays seem to have been disposable and simply for the moment of performance” … for Shakespeare? What happened to: The play is the thing! But then how amusingly he’s able to use words like “gawp” and expressions like “cock-a-snook”. Some his premises happily abandoned any conclusion: “The world is not full of people trembling or gnashing their teeth; it is full of people being.”(chapter 1) Just the same, some of his conclusions threw premises to the wind: “Agnosticism is conditioned by its own lack of articulacy.”(chapter7). Soundness better left to the Theater I suppose; in fact Dramgoole rated the soundness of six Theaters in the book just in case. Chapter 7 however was a metaphysical disaster, I wouldn’t have included it. But Chapter 8 tried to make up for it although “legalistically religious” seems absurd – Hamlet has to take preventative measures to secure his throne, duh – it’s not like he has time to pray for himself either!
Chapters 13 and 14 further defend Dramgoole’s psychological metaphysics of Hamlet but not before Dramgoole finds a women in Tbilisi who refuses to get sucked back into history at the end of chapter 12. He seems to have found a profound wisdom that would have informed tragic Hamlet well; “The Future is everything” she says. It was all fun to read though, the entire book, but I wanted more memoir, more of the adventure and spirit.
The actual unfolding of the events behind the stories may have been more richly displayed. There does seem to be tension among the cast, Dramgoole did a great but limited job of intersecting this tension by his reference to where the play was taking place in the world. The plot of the play conformed to the horizon under which it was performed and Dramgoole was tracking that for us in some sense. He does so may be by motivating the cast with backstage notes, Cambodia’s The Killing Fields, uncomfortable public speeches, dignitary getaways in Djbouti, Tommy Cooper sketches and so much more. But no ghost of anyone’s father rather a very, very modern take on human psychology: Goal Motivation and the fact that our goals, all of our goals, always break down and need to be emotionally recharged at some point. And that, of course, is where things can get tense.
A study published in April by the Society for Consumer Psychology associated people making beginning progress on goals through positive associations known as promotional motives. At some point though the people who are most likely to succeed secure the progress they have accomplished by taking defensive measures. Here’s this one transformational step in peoples’ motives from promotional to preventative motives that is necessary in order to complete almost any challenging goal. I find this shift in the plot of the book like one large wrinkle that gets eventually straightened out, but what’s interesting is the shift begins almost immediately in Chapter 2. Dramgoole is already reminding the cast to “keep putting one foot in front of the other”. That tension between shifting motives is played out in the entire book largely revolving an idea of “a long silence” which ironically is the words Hamlet asks for Horatio’s ever-lasting defense with.
I loved Chapter 11, one of the best Chapters written this year, so incredibly prevalent. The idea of a female Hamlet played in Saudi Arabia seems radically appropriate with the current zeitgeist of reform sweeping that country.
Alexander Pope claims in his Essay on Criticism that wit and judgment often are at strife, “Tho’ meant each other’s aid, like man and wife.” Going with the metaphor - Hamlet intends on getting married to the throne of Denmark– right? I don’t think that can be left out.
Somehow there’s a tarmac skid-noise metaphor - I would’ve cued the tarmac-skid immediately after he says in chapter 15: “the plays seem to have been disposable and simply for the moment of performance” … for Shakespeare? What happened to: The play is the thing! But then how amusingly he’s able to use words like “gawp” and expressions like “cock-a-snook”. Some his premises happily abandoned any conclusion: “The world is not full of people trembling or gnashing their teeth; it is full of people being.”(chapter 1) Just the same, some of his conclusions threw premises to the wind: “Agnosticism is conditioned by its own lack of articulacy.”(chapter7). Soundness better left to the Theater I suppose; in fact Dramgoole rated the soundness of six Theaters in the book just in case. Chapter 7 however was a metaphysical disaster, I wouldn’t have included it. But Chapter 8 tried to make up for it although “legalistically religious” seems absurd – Hamlet has to take preventative measures to secure his throne, duh – it’s not like he has time to pray for himself either!
Chapters 13 and 14 further defend Dramgoole’s psychological metaphysics of Hamlet but not before Dramgoole finds a women in Tbilisi who refuses to get sucked back into history at the end of chapter 12. He seems to have found a profound wisdom that would have informed tragic Hamlet well; “The Future is everything” she says. It was all fun to read though, the entire book, but I wanted more memoir, more of the adventure and spirit.
The actual unfolding of the events behind the stories may have been more richly displayed. There does seem to be tension among the cast, Dramgoole did a great but limited job of intersecting this tension by his reference to where the play was taking place in the world. The plot of the play conformed to the horizon under which it was performed and Dramgoole was tracking that for us in some sense. He does so may be by motivating the cast with backstage notes, Cambodia’s The Killing Fields, uncomfortable public speeches, dignitary getaways in Djbouti, Tommy Cooper sketches and so much more. But no ghost of anyone’s father rather a very, very modern take on human psychology: Goal Motivation and the fact that our goals, all of our goals, always break down and need to be emotionally recharged at some point. And that, of course, is where things can get tense.
A study published in April by the Society for Consumer Psychology associated people making beginning progress on goals through positive associations known as promotional motives. At some point though the people who are most likely to succeed secure the progress they have accomplished by taking defensive measures. Here’s this one transformational step in peoples’ motives from promotional to preventative motives that is necessary in order to complete almost any challenging goal. I find this shift in the plot of the book like one large wrinkle that gets eventually straightened out, but what’s interesting is the shift begins almost immediately in Chapter 2. Dramgoole is already reminding the cast to “keep putting one foot in front of the other”. That tension between shifting motives is played out in the entire book largely revolving an idea of “a long silence” which ironically is the words Hamlet asks for Horatio’s ever-lasting defense with.
I loved Chapter 11, one of the best Chapters written this year, so incredibly prevalent. The idea of a female Hamlet played in Saudi Arabia seems radically appropriate with the current zeitgeist of reform sweeping that country.
January 7, 2018
This epic road production of HAMLET had its genesis in 2012, the year of the London Olympics when Dromgoole, the Globe Theater director, said, "Let's take Hamlet to every country in the world." That incredible feat occurred over two years from 2014 to 2016. It was presented in English which would seem to be a problem for non-English speaking audiences, but the play is apparently so well known that it was not a major problem. Financing? No public funding, at least from the UK, Dromgoole stating that the troupe raised their own funds although I'm sure there was some funding from host countries.
Those preliminaries out of the way, the road trip was a success. The book has two strands, one describing the conditions and countries where HAMLET was mounted, and the other reflections on the timeliness of the play itself. I found the comments on Hamlet more interesting than the locations although the two are linked. There is always something in the locations that triggers the reflections on the play with the result being a shifting interplay between the two.
To begin with, and these comments are prompted by often unanticipated adaptations and improvisations of the play due tolocal conditions, Dromgoole points out that Shakespeare had no input at all in texts based on his plays. There is no "authoratative" text for any of of Shakespeare's play, much less HAMLET. Texts were assembled, based rough scripts and actors' memories of performances, and that meant a lot of improvisation, additions, deletions, all kinds of changes.
With all of the problems in the world, especially ones that are seen in the political structures of countries in South America, Africa, China, even in Europe and North Amrerica, the time is perpetually is "out of joint", always a discrepancy between the ideal and the reality outside of our heads. Youthful and idealistic Hamlet, faced with corruption, cruelty, and the nonsense that covers it, has to decide what to do about it, or if he can do anything. Of course, he gets pulled into the corruption himself - no wonder the play still has relevance anywhere in the world.
Dromgoole talks about the "scaffolding" it takes to put on a play, much of it unseen. Long hours of intense preparation by the actors (in this production, due to emergencies, illnesses, all kinds of unforeseen contingencies, every actor had to be able to play at least three roles), sets and props that could be put up and taken down in a hurry, transportation of equipment, cancelled plane flights, visa, licenses, lodging and security concerns, the list goes on and on.
At one point he compares the production to jazz, "There is something about the best jazz, the easy aimlessness to begin with, the lack of destination, the trace of a melody, the swaying sashaying of it, the bursts of virtuosity, the slips and slides of he harmonics, and then at a certain moment the sense that the whole crowd has been scooped up en masse into the adventure of an improvisation . . . shifting and hunting on through, something about that which only jazz can do."
Something, then, about this unlikely trek through the world that I found fascinating. Yes, HAMLET was being acted, but alongside these physical productions were Shakespeare's words about what it means to struggle, to improvise, to change course in life, as we all do, and finally to die. Reading GLOBE TO GLOBE, came as close, I thought, short of seeing the play itself, of making a play come alive.
Those preliminaries out of the way, the road trip was a success. The book has two strands, one describing the conditions and countries where HAMLET was mounted, and the other reflections on the timeliness of the play itself. I found the comments on Hamlet more interesting than the locations although the two are linked. There is always something in the locations that triggers the reflections on the play with the result being a shifting interplay between the two.
To begin with, and these comments are prompted by often unanticipated adaptations and improvisations of the play due tolocal conditions, Dromgoole points out that Shakespeare had no input at all in texts based on his plays. There is no "authoratative" text for any of of Shakespeare's play, much less HAMLET. Texts were assembled, based rough scripts and actors' memories of performances, and that meant a lot of improvisation, additions, deletions, all kinds of changes.
With all of the problems in the world, especially ones that are seen in the political structures of countries in South America, Africa, China, even in Europe and North Amrerica, the time is perpetually is "out of joint", always a discrepancy between the ideal and the reality outside of our heads. Youthful and idealistic Hamlet, faced with corruption, cruelty, and the nonsense that covers it, has to decide what to do about it, or if he can do anything. Of course, he gets pulled into the corruption himself - no wonder the play still has relevance anywhere in the world.
Dromgoole talks about the "scaffolding" it takes to put on a play, much of it unseen. Long hours of intense preparation by the actors (in this production, due to emergencies, illnesses, all kinds of unforeseen contingencies, every actor had to be able to play at least three roles), sets and props that could be put up and taken down in a hurry, transportation of equipment, cancelled plane flights, visa, licenses, lodging and security concerns, the list goes on and on.
At one point he compares the production to jazz, "There is something about the best jazz, the easy aimlessness to begin with, the lack of destination, the trace of a melody, the swaying sashaying of it, the bursts of virtuosity, the slips and slides of he harmonics, and then at a certain moment the sense that the whole crowd has been scooped up en masse into the adventure of an improvisation . . . shifting and hunting on through, something about that which only jazz can do."
Something, then, about this unlikely trek through the world that I found fascinating. Yes, HAMLET was being acted, but alongside these physical productions were Shakespeare's words about what it means to struggle, to improvise, to change course in life, as we all do, and finally to die. Reading GLOBE TO GLOBE, came as close, I thought, short of seeing the play itself, of making a play come alive.
September 25, 2017
What undiscovered country Shakespeare has gone to, we can only imagine, but 400 years after his death, his influence still finds its way across the globe. Specifically, the Globe sponsored tour to all countries of the world, an audacious feat, written from our animated director Dominic Dromgoogle. Two years, 190,0000 miles, 197 countries. It’s an adventure from the story of the players, the story of their encounters across cultures, and for reading between the lines, the adventure of us.
A college professor once said to our class when discussing the Hamlet references in the Waste Land, ‘no one stood up in 1600/1601 and said, wow, ‘Hamlet’ has arrived!’. To all of us who have found the spark for Shakespeare, the reasons for Hamlet being the best of the cannon ( if not the favorite), is that is so special. Special to Shakespeare’s personal life, special in it’s prolonged length, special as a play about the change of the guard in England, and perhaps the most fascinatingly multi-dimensional character he created. But scratch all that off. Because the print is only half the story. Dromgoogle explains the significance to a play, as it occurs before the eyes of audiences for all stripes.
Gifted with a literary ear, and an outsized personality, he writes from all angles of the production. And what fun it is to hear the adventure - “touring sharpens the pleasures that life in the theatre naturally affords – the sense of fleeting connection, of families created that are intense and short-lived, and all the more intense for their shortness” (p.60). He also wryly puts it, ‘outside of drugs, it’s the best time you can have’.
Describing the frightening prospect of performing in Mexico City, where too many people ate questionable chicken, the sense of urgency playing before a U.N. refugee camp, the afterflow of pool parties, or the humbling power of pressing his hand against a pristine mosque, life in all it’s madness is captured.
Delivering ‘to be or not to be’ in a flat, direct way, to strip apart the mystique of Hamlet, and connect with an audience as a human being is just one example of the artistic choices on presenting the play. Textual analysis here is informed, but not dogmatic. Soliloquies are explored, versions and interpretations are played with, and most importantly a joy for the language is delivered. No room for the pedantic, boring or the uninspired.
The world meets Prince Hamlet because of his active, thoughtful presence in the play. There are questions here on the worth of existence, the questions of action vs inquiry, and a messiness that fits with the banality and destruction of our world. Ultimately ‘Hamlet’ is a living breathing play, one that may be more appropriate in our culture than when it was first written. The next world tour may not be occurring any time soon…but luckily this dance with the Danish prince can pull you there if you let it.
A college professor once said to our class when discussing the Hamlet references in the Waste Land, ‘no one stood up in 1600/1601 and said, wow, ‘Hamlet’ has arrived!’. To all of us who have found the spark for Shakespeare, the reasons for Hamlet being the best of the cannon ( if not the favorite), is that is so special. Special to Shakespeare’s personal life, special in it’s prolonged length, special as a play about the change of the guard in England, and perhaps the most fascinatingly multi-dimensional character he created. But scratch all that off. Because the print is only half the story. Dromgoogle explains the significance to a play, as it occurs before the eyes of audiences for all stripes.
Gifted with a literary ear, and an outsized personality, he writes from all angles of the production. And what fun it is to hear the adventure - “touring sharpens the pleasures that life in the theatre naturally affords – the sense of fleeting connection, of families created that are intense and short-lived, and all the more intense for their shortness” (p.60). He also wryly puts it, ‘outside of drugs, it’s the best time you can have’.
Describing the frightening prospect of performing in Mexico City, where too many people ate questionable chicken, the sense of urgency playing before a U.N. refugee camp, the afterflow of pool parties, or the humbling power of pressing his hand against a pristine mosque, life in all it’s madness is captured.
Delivering ‘to be or not to be’ in a flat, direct way, to strip apart the mystique of Hamlet, and connect with an audience as a human being is just one example of the artistic choices on presenting the play. Textual analysis here is informed, but not dogmatic. Soliloquies are explored, versions and interpretations are played with, and most importantly a joy for the language is delivered. No room for the pedantic, boring or the uninspired.
The world meets Prince Hamlet because of his active, thoughtful presence in the play. There are questions here on the worth of existence, the questions of action vs inquiry, and a messiness that fits with the banality and destruction of our world. Ultimately ‘Hamlet’ is a living breathing play, one that may be more appropriate in our culture than when it was first written. The next world tour may not be occurring any time soon…but luckily this dance with the Danish prince can pull you there if you let it.
March 1, 2020
Mr. Drumgoole and the Globe actors undertook a monumental task: to bring one of Shakespeare’s iconic plays to the masses all over the world. His reasons are elusive (even to him) but once the idea was proposed they sallied forth with all the grit, determination and joie de vivre of kids who want to throw a musical in a barn.
The book reverberates with deep affection for the Bard of Avon and Hamlet. Mr. Drumgoole found the play taking on various different meanings and intensities wherever they played it…and they played it in the unlikeliest of venues. It often became the hot ticket in town, with people queuing up to see it, even if they didn’t understand a word of what was being spoken.
Mr. Drumgoole reveals an erudite knowledge of history, philosophy and the theatre as he explores the various countries the Globe theatrical troupe found themselves playing. The book is an awe-inspiring sweep of humanity, as he tackles the different dramatis personae and the themes swirling around the titular character like so many ghosts.
Mr. Drumgoole also delves into the practical side of things and his gratitude towards the amanuenses who soldier the burdens of getting passports, finding tickets, booking venues, setting up interviews, skirting local taboos and soothing the suspicions of dignitaries wary of foreign actors on their lands. You get quite a different perspective of touring when he writes of them being accompanied by blank-faced young men toting Kalashnikovs.
One thing that lowered my appreciation of this book was the short shrift he gave to Ophelia and Gertrude. Unlike Polonius, Claudius, Horatio and Hamlet himself—all of whom get extensive analyses—they don’t get more than a couple of paragraphs. You get the feeling that Mr. Drumgoole dismisses them as characters less than whole, beings only to be considered as attachments to their menfolk: Gertrude as the wife of two men and a widow, Ophelia as obedient daughter and ex-girlfriend. Nowhere does he explore how Gertrude may have felt pressured to re-marry since she may not have been allowed to rule on the throne alone or Ophelia’s possible resentment of her father and brother’s dismissal of her romantic relationship with the prince of Denmark and her subsequent loneliness and terror after her father’s inadvertent murder by her ex-lover.
But the majority of the book is a brilliant treatise and exploration of Shakespeare’s Dane, the way actors and actresses have played him and the feeling of joy and pleasure the various Globe members took in bringing him to far-flung countries. If you’ve ever adored Shakespeare or wanted to know why others do, this book is one I can highly recommend as introductory reading material. But introductory is all it is. Mr. Drumgoole makes it plain what I’ve long suspected—to appreciate a Shakespearean play, you have to see it being performed.
The book reverberates with deep affection for the Bard of Avon and Hamlet. Mr. Drumgoole found the play taking on various different meanings and intensities wherever they played it…and they played it in the unlikeliest of venues. It often became the hot ticket in town, with people queuing up to see it, even if they didn’t understand a word of what was being spoken.
Mr. Drumgoole reveals an erudite knowledge of history, philosophy and the theatre as he explores the various countries the Globe theatrical troupe found themselves playing. The book is an awe-inspiring sweep of humanity, as he tackles the different dramatis personae and the themes swirling around the titular character like so many ghosts.
Mr. Drumgoole also delves into the practical side of things and his gratitude towards the amanuenses who soldier the burdens of getting passports, finding tickets, booking venues, setting up interviews, skirting local taboos and soothing the suspicions of dignitaries wary of foreign actors on their lands. You get quite a different perspective of touring when he writes of them being accompanied by blank-faced young men toting Kalashnikovs.
One thing that lowered my appreciation of this book was the short shrift he gave to Ophelia and Gertrude. Unlike Polonius, Claudius, Horatio and Hamlet himself—all of whom get extensive analyses—they don’t get more than a couple of paragraphs. You get the feeling that Mr. Drumgoole dismisses them as characters less than whole, beings only to be considered as attachments to their menfolk: Gertrude as the wife of two men and a widow, Ophelia as obedient daughter and ex-girlfriend. Nowhere does he explore how Gertrude may have felt pressured to re-marry since she may not have been allowed to rule on the throne alone or Ophelia’s possible resentment of her father and brother’s dismissal of her romantic relationship with the prince of Denmark and her subsequent loneliness and terror after her father’s inadvertent murder by her ex-lover.
But the majority of the book is a brilliant treatise and exploration of Shakespeare’s Dane, the way actors and actresses have played him and the feeling of joy and pleasure the various Globe members took in bringing him to far-flung countries. If you’ve ever adored Shakespeare or wanted to know why others do, this book is one I can highly recommend as introductory reading material. But introductory is all it is. Mr. Drumgoole makes it plain what I’ve long suspected—to appreciate a Shakespearean play, you have to see it being performed.
August 8, 2017
“Hamlet Globe to Globe: two years, 190,000 miles, 197 countries, one play,” by Dominic Dromgoole (Grove, 2017). Dromgoole was the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater from 2006 to 2016. He was involved in the reconstruction of the theater to its appearance during Shakespeare’s day. And then he led a Globe production of “Hamlet” that did everything the subtitle says: in two years, they played in almost every country in the world (they could not get into North Korea despite months of trying). Dromgoole did not go with them for everything: he dropped in on productions in different countries, because he also had to keep the Globe theater going and supervise the logistics of the tour. It’s exhausting; it’s exhilarating; it’s madcap; it is brilliant in that peculiarly British manner, with verbal pyrotechnics going off in almost every sentence. There are two stories: first, the travels, all the oddity, the sadness, the joy of performing where no one had ever brought actors before: in a sandstorm in a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan; in a co-ed Saudi university that exists as a western bubble in a searing land; the joys of performing in Latin America, where Shakespeare is just one of the attractions of an exuberant street life, especially in Lima; in Somaliland, which doesn’t officially exist (the government official who greeted them declared that she was not really there, four days a week). They did play in Israel, but he doesn’t say anything about that (although he does report that there was political pressure to prevent the Israel stop). The second story: Dromgoole’s examination of the play, from every possible angle: friendship, theater, psychology. But mostly theater: His analysis of how it works, what actors do, how they interact with each other and the audience, could be extracted and made into a grand essay/handbook on theater. He may be a bit too much in love with his own words---but that could just be my envy speaking.
http://www.groveatlantic.com/?title=H...
September 12, 2018
First off - it's a great read.
That said, I expected something different. I thought there'd be more coverage of the tour, explaining how they set up their theatre, negotiated with the authorities, laid out the performance at different venues.
Dromgoole covers that, but it doesn't feature as much as I thought it would. Is that bad? Not necessarily. I still got out a lot from the book. Dromgoole makes the connection between parts of the play and the countries they visited (or at least some of the more striking countries where he travelled to joining the team). You learn a lot about his views of Hamlet and how the play translates to today's world.
You get a great insight into how the play relates to the venture of playing it worldwide. What you do not get is a play-by-play of how this venture was organized, how the cast felt. There are glimpses of that and yes, I would have liked more of it.
Still, I am satisfied with the book. Dromgoole is an engaging writer and the book is at times almost philosophical. It's a different view of the tour than I had anticipated, but a worthwile one.
If you only want to find out about how to stage/arrange a tour of this magnitude, how it was created and carried out, how the cast and crew felt and coped, then this is not your book. As Dromgoole did not act/stage manage, he only joined the cast for some legs of the tour and he observes the tour from a unique perspective. He's an insider, but with an outsider's viewpoint. He knows the intricacies of the staging, the performance, he experiences some of the difficulties, but he's not in the thick of it at all times.
What this book makes you want to read is the account/diary of a cast or crew member - I'm sure it would be incredibly intense and fascinating.
That said, I expected something different. I thought there'd be more coverage of the tour, explaining how they set up their theatre, negotiated with the authorities, laid out the performance at different venues.
Dromgoole covers that, but it doesn't feature as much as I thought it would. Is that bad? Not necessarily. I still got out a lot from the book. Dromgoole makes the connection between parts of the play and the countries they visited (or at least some of the more striking countries where he travelled to joining the team). You learn a lot about his views of Hamlet and how the play translates to today's world.
You get a great insight into how the play relates to the venture of playing it worldwide. What you do not get is a play-by-play of how this venture was organized, how the cast felt. There are glimpses of that and yes, I would have liked more of it.
Still, I am satisfied with the book. Dromgoole is an engaging writer and the book is at times almost philosophical. It's a different view of the tour than I had anticipated, but a worthwile one.
If you only want to find out about how to stage/arrange a tour of this magnitude, how it was created and carried out, how the cast and crew felt and coped, then this is not your book. As Dromgoole did not act/stage manage, he only joined the cast for some legs of the tour and he observes the tour from a unique perspective. He's an insider, but with an outsider's viewpoint. He knows the intricacies of the staging, the performance, he experiences some of the difficulties, but he's not in the thick of it at all times.
What this book makes you want to read is the account/diary of a cast or crew member - I'm sure it would be incredibly intense and fascinating.
April 15, 2018
A very disappointing book. And here’s why. Dominic Dromgoole, former director of the Globe Theater, had an idea to present Hamlet to every country on the planet. He and his staff did it and I thought this would be a fascinating book to read about that endeavor.
Instead, it’s a rambling dissertation about the play itself and in only very few instances does Dromgoole write about how audiences in some countries received the play and about some of the logistical challenges they had in putting on the play in war torn locations.
When Dromgoole writes about the play, it’s very interesting and I learned some new aspects of the play I had never heard before. When it comes to Shakespeare, Dromgoole clearly knows his stuff.
Every chapter in the book lists the countries visited in chronological order. But the chapter itself has nothing to do with those visits. We go from place to place, with brief mentions of how the play was conducted and received by people. At one point, he casually mentions the interpreters. What? There were interpreters? How was the play interpreted in different parts of the world? It certainly couldn’t mean the same thing to everyone. But we will never know. Dromgoole says nothing about that.
He does say that members of the troupe were writing their own memoirs about this experience. I hope that at least one of them will provide all the information that Dromgoole does not.
Instead, it’s a rambling dissertation about the play itself and in only very few instances does Dromgoole write about how audiences in some countries received the play and about some of the logistical challenges they had in putting on the play in war torn locations.
When Dromgoole writes about the play, it’s very interesting and I learned some new aspects of the play I had never heard before. When it comes to Shakespeare, Dromgoole clearly knows his stuff.
Every chapter in the book lists the countries visited in chronological order. But the chapter itself has nothing to do with those visits. We go from place to place, with brief mentions of how the play was conducted and received by people. At one point, he casually mentions the interpreters. What? There were interpreters? How was the play interpreted in different parts of the world? It certainly couldn’t mean the same thing to everyone. But we will never know. Dromgoole says nothing about that.
He does say that members of the troupe were writing their own memoirs about this experience. I hope that at least one of them will provide all the information that Dromgoole does not.
April 30, 2021
If I had to describe this book in a few words, those words would be....horribly mismarketed. At least by the book jacket. The book is entirely honest about its contents the moment you make it halfway into the first chapter. It is a meditation on the nature of theater through the lenses of cultures and contexts often ignored by western storytelling and sensibility. I'm sure there is a story somewhere about the trials, tribulations, and exciting, exhausting effort of taking an ancient show to every country possible. It's just not this. That's not to say though, that you should not read it or that it is not worth your time
As a technical theater person myself, this is a story that rings near and dear to my heart. I have toured Shakespeare before as a stage manager barely hanging on by a thread, and to see little moments from a tour this expansive is simultaneously awe-inspiring and nostalgic for a person hungering for theater in the middle of a plague. The thoughts and perspectives lent to Hamlet by all who interact with it over the course of the tour are fascinating, and the little moments glimpsed into the tour by the director are a fun read. If you're a theater person, check it out - just know what you're getting into.
As a technical theater person myself, this is a story that rings near and dear to my heart. I have toured Shakespeare before as a stage manager barely hanging on by a thread, and to see little moments from a tour this expansive is simultaneously awe-inspiring and nostalgic for a person hungering for theater in the middle of a plague. The thoughts and perspectives lent to Hamlet by all who interact with it over the course of the tour are fascinating, and the little moments glimpsed into the tour by the director are a fun read. If you're a theater person, check it out - just know what you're getting into.
August 14, 2017
This book is not a chronological narrative of the tour. Once you stop expecting that, you'll get on better. What it is, is a series of meditations on different intersections of the play with the history and society of the places that the company performed it. Dromgoole loves Hamlet and you probably will too by the time the book is over, if you didn't already. (He really doesn't like Richard II, however, which is too bad.) Unfortunately, it added an additional item to my next-life bucket list - besides playing violin in an orchestra, I'd also take up theater... There were a lot of stops on the tour that I wish I could have learned more about, but after all, a book can only be so long and there were about 197 stops. We in the west are so jaded; Shakespeare is old incomprehensible stuff to too many of us, whereas in every place they took this play, audiences were deeply engaged in the story whether or not they even understood English. Theater was something that many of their spectators are rarely able to experience, and also Shakespeare is deeply subversive in his ability to translate Big Questions into problems besetting small humans. Long live the Globe.
August 11, 2021
From 2014 to 2016, a company from the Globe Theatre in London (rebuilt near the site of the historic Globe Theatre where Shakespeare’s acting company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men, performed his plays) toured the world with a production of Hamlet, visiting 197 countries. Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director at the Globe at the time, recounts the highs, lows and bureaucratic and logistical nightmares of that tour while reflecting upon Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy. Dromgoole draws insightful parallels between the themes of the play and modern life, gives a bit of history of English theater and admits that the venture was a hubristic task from the start. For me the highlights were his remembrances of performances is locales where theater is not the norm, such as at a co-ed university in Saudi Arabia, several refuge camps and in a cultural center in Somaliland, a country not recognized by the African Union or the UN. While a basic knowledge and love of Shakespeare and Hamlet is required, this is a fascinating account of the impact of theater and storytelling across cultures and around the world.
May 11, 2017
If you are fascinated by Shakespeare and the theater, you probably will enjoy this book. I did.
Dromgoole is the artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London. He tells about the Globe's exciting project to produce Hamlet in every country in the world. The company actually managed to bring the play to 190 countries over the space of two years!
Dromgoole was able to go to only some of the countries, but those are far-flung. He tries to convey what it was like to bring Hamlet (in English) to such varied places as Taipei, Lima, Bogota, Riyadh, Kiev, Amman, and the Zaatari camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan. The descriptions of the places, while brief, are fascinating.
However, I thought there was too much of him in the book. He discusses the play frequently, with interesting observations, but I would have preferred a little less of him. Nonetheless, the book is a must for those who feel Hamlet is perhaps the greatest play ever written.
Dromgoole is the artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London. He tells about the Globe's exciting project to produce Hamlet in every country in the world. The company actually managed to bring the play to 190 countries over the space of two years!
Dromgoole was able to go to only some of the countries, but those are far-flung. He tries to convey what it was like to bring Hamlet (in English) to such varied places as Taipei, Lima, Bogota, Riyadh, Kiev, Amman, and the Zaatari camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan. The descriptions of the places, while brief, are fascinating.
However, I thought there was too much of him in the book. He discusses the play frequently, with interesting observations, but I would have preferred a little less of him. Nonetheless, the book is a must for those who feel Hamlet is perhaps the greatest play ever written.
May 21, 2017
I saw this book in our local library in the travel writing section. I really enjoy quirky travelogues so having read the synopsis and the quotes decided to read it.
It is more a love note to Hamlet than a travelogue. Over half the book is the author giving this opinion on what Hamlet and sections of the play are about. Under 50% is about travel and the performances of the play. Yet that is the best part of the book. The section on the performance in the refugee camp is deeply moving.
As a result I found this a desperately frustrating read and when the author highlighted (all too briefly) in the conclusion about other stories he could have told but didn't I nearly threw the book out the train window.
The Author alludes in the book to the actors writing their own books. I hope they do and I hope it is more about their experiences than their academic thesis on Hamlet and the importance thereof.
It is more a love note to Hamlet than a travelogue. Over half the book is the author giving this opinion on what Hamlet and sections of the play are about. Under 50% is about travel and the performances of the play. Yet that is the best part of the book. The section on the performance in the refugee camp is deeply moving.
As a result I found this a desperately frustrating read and when the author highlighted (all too briefly) in the conclusion about other stories he could have told but didn't I nearly threw the book out the train window.
The Author alludes in the book to the actors writing their own books. I hope they do and I hope it is more about their experiences than their academic thesis on Hamlet and the importance thereof.
May 10, 2018
It was an amazing, crazy feat to perform “Hamlet” in every country around the world. Dromgoole didn’t actually do the touring; he was the artistic director of the Globe and flew out occasionally during the two years to meet up with the troupe and catch a performance and give the actors and techs a morale boost or just a lifeline. Each chapter looked at a particular country and the aspect of “Hamlet” it caused him to reflect on, such as visiting a country where women have few freedoms and then drawing the connection to Ophelia and Gertrude in the play. Or everyone coming down with food poisoning and the theme of illness in “Hamlet.” I found it a really thoughtful, insightful book, not just about the themes in “Hamlet” but also about the theater, ways to approach a play, what it takes to be an actor, a director, how you punt when you don’t have a stage, the costumes, an audience that’s doesn’t speak English.
July 2, 2018
There were moments when I absolutely adored this book- the intro was lovely, there were some sublime moments within, there were some excellent insights on the play itself- and there were times when I wanted to smack the author, because he let his ego get in the way, sometimes in truly obnoxious ways.
I really wish one of the actors had written the book instead, because the author (the artistic director) did not go to every show, and in fact missed huge chunks of the tour, thus losing some of his credibility as an authority on the show. While chapter headings show the exact order the shows, he jumps around in time almost incomprehensibly, often struggling a bit to make his experiences fit into matched thematic categories of Hamlet.
I still really enjoyed most of the book, but I really wanted to smack the author on several occasions, and tell him to stop letting his ego ruin it.
I really wish one of the actors had written the book instead, because the author (the artistic director) did not go to every show, and in fact missed huge chunks of the tour, thus losing some of his credibility as an authority on the show. While chapter headings show the exact order the shows, he jumps around in time almost incomprehensibly, often struggling a bit to make his experiences fit into matched thematic categories of Hamlet.
I still really enjoyed most of the book, but I really wanted to smack the author on several occasions, and tell him to stop letting his ego ruin it.
January 8, 2024
My impression after finally finishing the book is that I would have loved to see the show, but I would hate to have a conversation with Dominic Dromgoole. The book is less about the actual tour and more about his self-aggrandizement. He opines on Shakespeare, Culture, War, Islam, and the Human Condition with a smug superiority and a strong vibe of the British Colonialist, the only one who understands them truly. All other theatre productions are apparently either underambitious or overpretentious, he's the only one who gets it right. And it was infuriating to read page after page of Dromgoole retelling anecdotes of himself being super funny with politicians he likes (Obama), and laying down epic burns on politicians he doesn't (third most powerful man in Russia), and totally dunks on directors more famous than himself. I am so, so glad the book is over...
August 5, 2017
I am shamelessly entranced by the performance of Shakespeare, and this book took me behind the scenes of the modern-day Globe's ambitious project to perform "Hamlet" in every country in the world. The best thing about this book, for me, is exploring Dromgoole's thoughts on the play and its performance. He's quite insightful and has decades of experience in the theater, so I feel like I understand "Hamlet" so much better now. I do hope one of the players or stage managers who made the whole tour will publish a book on it and give us more insight into what it takes to spend two years basically on the road with 15 other people, performing the same play in nearly 200 different venues, some planned far in advance, others improvised.
December 15, 2018
This is a book for theatre nerds and Shakespeare lovers (and I happen to be both!). In 2015, the Globe Theatre sent a small troupe of actors and stage managers out with a production of 'Hamlet' with the goal of playing in every country in the world. They played in 143 countries over a two-year span. This book tells that story, but also connects themes and ideas from Hamlet to what's happening around the world. It's part literary analysis, part travel yarn, and part theatre lore - so, you know, three things I connect to. Of course, I particularly loved the section on Kyiv, as they were here the day before the last election and right after Euromaidan. (I vaguely remember that tickets were gone before I knew they were in town!) A great read for Shakespeare and theatre lovers.
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